Jetpack to the WP.com Cloud

No one really gets the distinction between the two things called WordPress at first, the dot-com and the dot-org.

On dot-com in just a few clicks you’re set up on a web-scale centralized platform that constantly gets new upgrades and features. And you never have to worry about it because it’s completely hassle-free and completely supported by our happiness team.

On dot-org you sign up and host your blog with a hosting company and you get complete control over every aspect of your plugins and code, but you also have the responsibility of maintaining it and adding anything new you want to try.

Our users have been banging down the door for this. Every time we launch something new on WP.com the first question is always asking how people can get it for their self-hosted blog. Now you can have your cake and eat it too — host your own blog, completely under your control and with the freedom of the GPL, and still get all the cloud goodies of our hosted service. It’s the best of both worlds, the decentralized and the centralized, the control and the convenience, the peanut butter and the chocolate.

In short, it’s the vision I had for WordPress when I first founded Automattic five years ago finally coming to fruition (and from an amazing team). And we’re thrilled to be joined by great partners as well — Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple, and Network Solutions are launch partners. The one-click WordPress installs on all the largest web hosts in the world are now Jetpack-enabled, which means that the vast majority of people experiencing WordPress for the first time will have a seamless Jetpack experience.

For launch we’ve brought eight of the most-requested features into Jetpack as one easy bundle: Hovercards, Stats, After the Deadline, Twitter widget, shortcodes, shortlinks, easy Facebook/Twitter/WordPress sharing buttons (Sharedaddy), and for our fellow math nerds, . We’re excited about this initial set of features, but we’re even more excited for what’s coming down the road.

(Mozilla Jetpack is a wonderful, but entirely unrelated, open source project run by Mozilla Labs, which, if you know CSS/JavaScript, makes it easier than ever to improve Firefox. We checked with them first and we’re mutually cool on the name.)

Yes and No. It is a bundle of plugins, but some (like Stats) take advantage of WordPress.com, which provides functionality self hosted blogs can’t do alone. Future versions of Jetpack will have more of these features.

I installed Jetpack with success, but when I click ‘Connect to worrdpress.com’ , it gives following error :
“Your Jetpack has a glitch. Connecting this site with WordPress.com is not possible. This usually means your site is not publicly accessible (localhost).”

I have this problem and investigated a bit. Turned out an https call was failing as curl on my web server wasn’t configured with a certificate bundle to validate against (so it was complaining that it couldn’t trust the SSL connection). I’m guessing the verification step in JetPack makes a call over https to wordpress.com, but the error message itself is buried.

In my case there’s no easy workaround as you have to recompile / reinstall curl to get it to look for a certificate bundle but if it’s something similar you may be more lucky!

You will need to use Jetpack on a public facing site for it to work correctly. We will consider ways to improve this in future versions.

Requiring the connection was a UX decision, we wanted to simplify the process for the majority of users who are non-technical. Requiring a connection for some modules and not others would have added a layer of confusion. New modules in Jetpack will likely need the WordPress.com cloud, so getting the connection part over and done with will improve the experience of future upgrades.

My site is publicly accessible. (I see another commenter noticed a discrepancy regarding connection for dot-com domains versus dot-net domains. Mine is also a dot-net domain.).

I don’t have a problem with a single WPCOM authentication. It’s a nice, clean solution for the components that do require it. I just don’t understand why enabling of the the non-API components is also tied to that authentication. It doesn’t seem like it would be an impossible UX problem to solve. 🙂

You also have to keep in mind that a huge percentage of Jetpack’s new users are getting the plugin auto-activated by their host on install, and we didn’t want to turn on any features until they had taken a step to activate Jetpack.

Jetpack does load additional resources on your blog if you have all modules activated. Almost anything you do that adds features to your site will add more requests though, so this is always something you’d need to consider. If you are concerned about performance, then you should review each module and disable any that you don’t want to use.

Very awesome job! am so happy to see this released.
There is one thing I’d like to see added though,
facebook/twitter connect/commenting support.
there are too many facebook/twitter connect plugins
and NONE of them work! since nobody registers for a WP
blog anymore, its kind of useless to even have the account feature
in individual blogs. Who wants to register for yet another new blog?
if you can comment with your existing wordpress.com account that would be different,
but most people have facebook and or twitter already so it only makes sense to support those. I have said for years they should add that functionality to the wordpress core, but it never gets done, so I say add to jetpack

I want to know and to ask if it possible in the future to bring out the experience of http://www.wordpress.com to every wordpresser including .org- self hosted blogers- . I say that will be thery nice if we, selfhosted wordpress bloggers, participate more in the http://www.wordpress.com with out post… if they are alowed in the global dashboard of wp.com…
Salutari!

Fresh install of WP on my Media Temple hosting. Connected and installed JetPack, yet, trying to actually run the modules like Stats gives me “Module could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error. Perhaps there is a conflict with another plugin you have installed?” No other plugins are installed.

This is sure an interesting strategic decision by Automattic! I guess it’s one way of adding more functionality to wordpress.org without ‘bloating’ the core wordpress.org software; wordpress.org software is still left nice an lean but multiple functionality can very easily be added through jetpack.
It’ll be interesting to see how Plugin authors/developers that distribute Plugins that compete with those included in jetpack react.
I believe that this is a good way for non-techies that have a self-hosted WordPress site to easily add commonly used functionality.

I downloaded and installed Jet Pack yesterday and after some trouble with that glitch it worked perfectly! This morning though is said that I hadn’t verified the API key, which was true because at no point had the program asked for it or offered a place to put it.

It still isn’t offering anywhere for me to put it but won’t let me use any of the feature either. Where on earth am a I supposed to put this key? I’ve looked everywhere! Help please, I would love to be able to keep using jetpack (Especially stats!).

also, I’m a little miffed that there seems to be tons of users blowing up in the forums about how first WP-stats and now WP-popular posts plugins seem to have been affected by the API->XMLRPC move. Lots of publishers use the latter (which relies on the first) in customized ways, and I think a lot of technical people would have loved some warning that that was happening so that they could have time to make changes, and not just wake up with major parts of their sites not working. I know, I know, get what you pay for, but it seems like it would have taken very little effort to warn the community of changes. Or maybe y’all did warn us, and no one noticed? (please please please point to this!)

thanks for all you do in creating/nurturing this ecosystem,

David
(in our case, jetpack isn’t an immediate possibility because of buddypress and other customization of our install…)

First I noticed that WordPress.com Stats just stopped working. Then, I discover that I am unable to install Jetpack. I have two BuddyPress sites that I have done pro bono for prospective clients who I have been trying to impress with how great WordPress and BuddyPress are. I have wasted many hours on this so far and it is still not clear whether Jetpack is supposed to work with BuddyPress or not.

I’d be a happy paying customer if I was given a clue about things like this, so I don’t waste hours of my time.

Can anyone tell me whether Jetpack will work with BuddyPress if I pay for an Akismet account?

Is is one thing to change a policy without warning, but even worse to leave users in the dark about how to get things working again.

This sounds great and I was hopping for something like this; however, what I’m really looking for is the ‘Publish to’ feature with the added benefit of publishing to, not only Facebook and Twitter, but to Live Journal as well. If that could happen then I could finally move all of my blogs to dot-org.

Since Jetpack came out, the original wordpress.com stats plugin I’ve used on all my self hosted sites have stopped working. The error message it’s displaying is “Your WordPress.com account, ‘username’ is not authorized to view the stats of this blog.”
I read somewhere this is caused by Jetpack but I’m not sure how. Can anyone lend some light to the issue?

It seems to be back up and running, but I’m not sure it’s accurate. On several of my sites, there is a discrepancy between the blog stats “views today” and the line graph number. Also, the number of hits over the past several days has changed from what they originally were showing before the stats plugin stopped working entirely. The number of total and daily hits that are showing has also gone down, but I don’t know if that’s just a traffic fluctuation or the plugin error.

There are several reasons we are moving to self hosted. The first is the most common, the lack of plugins and control on the dot-com version. The second is that we don’t want to be hosted on a highly visible system. Dot-com hosts a huge variety of sites, some of which attract unwanted attention because of the views espoused. This has resulted in DDOS attacks, and I’m sure, attempts at hacking into the site to steal user information. Self hosting doesn’t prevent that, but it does reduce the likelihood.

Jetpack seems like a great idea, but once again you are dependent on the dot-com version to be available. If somebody does a DDOS on the dot-com site, aren’t you once again subjected to the adverse affects?

I am new to this whole thing and have limited HTML and CSS knowledge. Do I need ot buy yet another product from GoDaddy to use this? I do not see why I would need an SSL if I am not performing transactions on my site, but maybe I am wrong. Help!